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The Employers' Offensive and Canadian Public Sector Unions

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The Employers' Offensive and Canadian Public Sector Unions Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 95‐115 Copyright © 2011 The Author(s) SPECIAL ISSUE ON ORGANIZING FOR AUSTERITY: THE NEOLIBERAL STATE, REGULATING LABOUR AND WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE The ‘Great Recession,’ the Employers’ Offensive and Canadian Public Sector Unions DAVID CAMFIELD Labour Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Abstract The global economic crisis and its effects have changed the context for public sector unions in Canada. There is evidence that an intensified offensive against public sector unions is beginning. Few public sector unions are prepared to respond adequately to such an offensive, as the important 2009 strike by Toronto municipal workers illustrates. In this more difficult context, change within public sector unions is increasingly urgent. The most promising direction for union renewal lies in the praxis of social movement unionism. However, there are very few signs of moves to promote this approach within Canadian public sector unions. Résumé La crise économique globale et ses effets ont changé le contexte pour les syndicats du secteur public au Canada. Il y a des signes qu’une attaque violente contre les syndicats du secteur public a commencé. Peu de syndicats du secteur public sont prêts à répondre dans une manière satisfaisante à cette attaque, comme le montre la grève importante des travailleurs municipaux à Toronto en 2009. Dans ce contexte plus difficile, des changements au sein des syndicats du secteur public sont de plus en plus urgents. La direction la plus prometteuse pour une renaissance syndicale est la pratique d’un syndicalisme de mouvement social. Toutefois, il y a très peu d’indices que les syndicats du secteur public au Canada s’inscrivent dans une telle approche. Keywords Canada; public sector; unions; union renewal Mots clés Canada ; secteur public ; renaissance syndicale ; syndicats The global economic crisis, the ensuing responses from all levels of government and the development of a political climate more favorable to the neoliberal project of restructuring the public sector have changed the David Camfield teaches Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba. His book Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement was published by Fernwood in April 2011. David Camfield enseigne les études ouvrières à l’Université de Manitoba. Son livre Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement a été publié par Fernwood en avril 2011. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes: The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies / Revue de la Société d'études socialistes www.socialiststudies.com ISSN 1918‐2821 Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 95‐115 context for public sector unions in Canada. There is evidence that governments and other public sector employers are beginning to conduct an intensified offensive against public sector unions. This offensive will likely feature not only freezes for wage and benefit costs but also other concessionary demands and job cuts, along with new efforts to restructure the public sector. Few public sector unions are prepared to respond adequately to a more aggressive employers’ offensive, as the important strike of Toronto municipal workers in the summer of 2009 illustrates. This highlights the increasingly urgent need for efforts to bring about change within public sector unions. But what kind of change is most appropriate in these circumstances? Union renewal always involves the cultivation of a particular mode of union praxis. Currently, most Canadian public sector unions continue to practice social unionism. Three alternative modes of union praxis present themselves as potentially more effective: corporate unionism, mobilization unionism and social movement unionism. I will argue that the most promising alternative is social movement unionism. However, there are at present very few signs of moves to promote this approach within Canadian public sector unions, for reasons that will be briefly considered. 96 Neoliberalism, Public Sector Restructuring and the ‘Great Recession’ The global economic crisis that began in 2008 – the worst crisis since the Great Depression of 1929‐1939 – has been a crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal form. Neoliberalism is best understood as a project for reorganizing capitalism in response to the global economic crisis of the mid‐1970s. That crisis exposed the limits of the Keynesian‐compromise organization of capitalism that had taken shape after the Second World War and provided the framework for the uniquely sustained period of expansion that followed, one of whose features was a major expansion of the public sector (McNally 2011). As Alfredo Saad‐Filho and Deborah Johnston (2005, 3) have argued: Although every country is different, and historical analysis can reveal remarkably rich details, the overall picture is clear. The most basic feature of neoliberalism is the systematic use of state power to impose (financial) market imperatives, in a domestic process that is replicated internationally by ‘globalisation.’ The neoliberal project has driven the restructuring of the public sector that has been taking place across the advanced capitalist countries CAMFIELD: “The Great Recession” for the last three decades. This restructuring is associated with the ideas of New Public Management (NPM), but it is not persuasive to assess the changes within NPM’s own terms, “as being primarily concerned with efficiency, effectiveness and economy” (Carter 2006, 148). The essence of public sector restructuring is an effort to reconstruct the broad welfare state form of public administration developed during the long post‐war boom in order to reorient the public sector towards supporting economic competitiveness under neoliberal capitalism (Camfield 2007; Carter 2006). This process can be analysed as the construction of “lean states,” states better‐suited to remaking societies in the age of lean production (Sears 1999). The degree to which this has actually taken place has varied widely across the advanced capitalist countries (Carter 2006). To the extent that it has taken place, the construction of lean states has been harmful to the users of public services, public sector workers and their unions. Unfortunately, research on public sector workers has suffered from the broad intellectual trend identified by Perry Anderson (2010, 6): “Studies of the working class anywhere in the world, once a staple of history and sociology, have declined along with labour movements as a political force.” However, such recent research on public sector workers in Canada as has been published continues to confirm the negative impact on 97 workers of neoliberal work reorganization. For example, Norene Pupo and Andy Noack (2009, 2010) have shown how the federal government’s creation of Service Canada call centres has been experienced by most call centre workers as having created a more stressful, speeded‐up work environment in which they are subjected to harsher management and less able to deliver quality public service. This is not the place to examine contending accounts of the causes and dynamics of the economic crisis, important though they are.1 But it is vital to note that one consequence of this crisis has been a rapid growth of state debt in the advanced capitalist countries. The cost of the neoliberal remedy for capitalism’s crisis ‐‐ bailing‐out failing financial firms and engaging in stimulus spending to prevent the crisis from becoming a catastrophic collapse ‐‐ has been estimated at approximately $20 trillion (McNally 2011, 2‐3). This unprecedented intervention to shore up global capitalism, along with falling tax revenues and higher welfare costs caused by the recession, have driven up debt to GDP ratios in the advanced capitalist countries. While economic predictions of this kind often turn out to be inaccurate, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF 2010, 7) estimate 1 Of the explanations offered thus far, I find McNally 2011 the most persuasive. Socialist Studies / Études socialistes 7(1/2) Spring/Fall 2011: 95‐115 in February 2010 was that across the G‐7 countries “large fiscal deficits, reflecting cyclical factors, financial support measures, stimulus packages, and underlying structural spending pressures are expected to raise the general government gross debt‐to‐GDP ratio to about 120 percent in 2014, from around 80 percent in 2008.” For partisans of neoliberalism, for whom deficits are anathema (at least in principle), the rapid growth of debt is a nightmarish scenario. Neoliberal opposition to budget deficits has several rationales. One is the straightforward desire to weaken social programs and the public sector in order to reinforce the subordination of the state and workers to “the power of money” (Clarke 1988, 356). Restraining deficits serves to limit any moves to enlarge the public sector or redefine it in ways that would be advantageous to workers. A second is that deficits are alleged to cause inflation.2 Inflation is demonized by neoliberals for a variety of reasons. It squeezes the real value of revenue flows derived from interest payments, thereby reducing the profitability of financialized capital. Inflation could, hypothetically, lead to spiraling wage demands from workers, although the current conditions of wage‐earners and unions in the advanced capitalist countries do not lend credibility to a scenario of rising wage militancy. 98 Higher levels of inflation would also allow less‐competitive firms to take advantage of fluctuating
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